Kickass Clowns and Bloody Murder
by Killing Joke
Summary: There's never really going to a good time to be Ronald McDonald. But there's hardly a worse place to do it than in Gotham, where the competition can be murder.
1. Chapter 1

_Purely for Deedee, who wanted to see it. _

* * *

><p>At three a.m, it could almost be sinister.<p>

During the day, the place teems with life, with noise, with industrious bustling to and fro. A place of children's laughter, of children's tears, of little plastic models being hurled back and forth. A place where you arrive in desire and hunger and leave sated and thirsty, salt dusting your lips.

The golden arches. Ronnie Mack's. Maccy D's.

At three a.m., it could almost be sinister.

The last work shift ends at two a.m. The kitchen shuts at midnight, but those who draw the short shift straw will be up to their shoulders in the grease-stained, stinking frying vats until two, scrubbing and cleaning to conform to Health Department standards. Those who fear joining the McDonald's food distribution team are generally fearing the wrong thing. The burger-flipping, the defrosting, the wrapping and the frying are jobs from heaven when you're the one who has to go home every night, exhausted, at half two with your hair and skin so full of miscellaneous fats that you will still be able to smell McDonald's after six showers and a Turkish bath.

However, even the vat-scrubbers have to look down on someone, and that someone is the man who has to dress up as Ronald McDonald for the children's parties. It is the loser's job. The job given to any lanky student who will fit the costume (staff have been known to put on up to a hundred pounds in weight to avoid this - as McDonald's provides free food to its workers, this doesn't take as long as you might imagine). Even cleaning the toilets is a better job than putting on the clown white - when masquerading as Ronald McDonald, you have to be prepared for ballistic, semi-masticated food, tiny faery voices shouting at volumes that would out-bellow the engines of a revving 747, surprising puddles of urine, and, in extreme cases, projectile vomit.

No-one really wants to be Ronald McDonald. The red and white inane grin of the happy cholesterol-peddler doesn't appeal to any age group, not anymore. Children either greet your arrival with floods of tears or deep, penetrating scorn: adults regard you with the vague, embarrassed look of someone who is feeling an incalculable sense of shame at being part of the same species as you.

And in the early hours of this Sunday morning, at a small McDonald's just off the ring road circling Gotham, it is a _particularly_ bad time to be Ronald McDonald.

The man wearing the outfit is a freak of nature. This is not in any way discriminatory or insulting to him: it is pure fact. He is almost forty years old, thirty-eight to be precise. He has a naturally receding hairline, something which bothered him ten years ago but is of no consequence to him now, and he is a star.

He has been a star for three years now. Last year he changed his name by deed poll. It wasn't a large leap from Frank McDonald to Ronald McDonald, and Frank had been so enamoured of his new identity as the face of fast food everywhere that it had seemed natural to do so. His face, behind the thick make-up, has appeared in six TV commercials and is on posters all over the world.

He is a freak of nature because he actually enjoys being the McDonald's clown, and it is this odd genetic quirk that has kept him in the restaurant hours after it shut, practicing his clown routine for the party he has to attend at teatime tomorrow.

"Hi kids, it's time to play Ronald's Numbers!"

A pause. Then, in a slightly brighter tone:

"Hey, kids, want to play Ronald's Numbers?"

In the mirror of the men's restroom, Ronald McDonald shakes his red wig at himself. No good. Needs to be…friendlier. He takes a sip of water, spits it delicately into the sink, then tries again.

"Hi, kids…"

His voice falters. Out in the restaurant, echoing slightly in the metal and plastic silence, someone has started playing the harmonica.

They are playing it well, and in a style genre fans would recognise as the Western gunslinger's shoot-out progression. The shrill, at times discordant notes ripple through the empty rooms, ring through the shining vats, and hum pleasantly along the copper pipes of the men's room.

Ronald frowns behind his perpetually smiling face paint, turns away from the mirror, and pushes his way out into the seating area. He knows for a fact that he is the last employee in the building: the duty manager left over an hour ago, leaving Ronald to lock up. But he is not afraid, another genetic quirk which will prove not to be a survivalist feature, and walks out proudly, synthetic red curls bobbing with every step of the ridiculous clown shoes.

There is a man standing leant up against the service counter, a tall, thin, angular man wearing a large purple hat pulled down to shadow his face. The harmonica is gripped in his pale fingers as he plays the familiar notes.

"Hey," says Ronald, amicably enough, "you're not supposed to be in here, buddy. We're closed."

The harmonica player stops, abruptly, and pockets the little instrument casually. Although he remains almost utterly in shadow and his face hidden by the cast of his hat, he projects an aura of amused scrutiny. Tiny points of light gleam, reflections in his eyes.

"Who are you?" Ronald persists. "Seriously. I'm gonna have to call the cops."

The hat is swept off in the next moment, revealing a shock of green hair in the remaining synthetic light. A face as white as Ronald's but with an even bigger grin, looks up and laughs.

"Well, dip me in batter and fry me like a doughnut," says the Joker, delighted, "don't you know me, brother? Ain't'cha my street bro, member of the posse, down with the homies?"

He takes two dancing steps forward and treads deliberately on the toes of the clown shoes in his own patent leathers. "Shoot, baby, I'm the Hamburglar."

It is merely the sudden, lethal proximity that draws Ronald's attention to exactly how much trouble he's in - that and the glimpse of a variety of weaponry hanging from the Joker's belt and coat lining. The Joker beams like a delighted six-year-old. "And I wanna play Ronald's Numbers."


	2. Chapter 2

"Have you ever considered," the Joker continues in a tone of immense scholarly concern, "that you're processed." A sharp finger with chipped green nail polish jabs Ronald in the chest. "Meat?" The hand turns, rubs the garish red and yellow fabric between its fingers in a form of brief sartorial horror, then releases.

It's an interesting point, if perhaps Ronald won't find it particularly comforting at this precise moment.

McDonald's all is about falseness, really. The food is fake, the bonhomie of the staff is fake, the pictures of the burgers displayed above the counter are never truly anything like the slightly flattened reality of what's in your processed polystyrene clamshell. The only thing that's real is the advertising, and anyone who's ever worked in advertising will tell you that it's a very flimsy sort of reality indeed.

Like generic fast food burgers everywhere, Ronald is a processed sandwich: built up from layers of flimflam, the shadows of food wrapped in the shroud of marketing. And even these words really make the thing sound a whole lot more glamorous than it is. But the Joker (who is standing right there, if you look, his grin a gash of carmine in his bleached face, his green eyes oddly focussed) is a prime cut of beef on stoneground sesame home-baked. Or possibly half-baked.

Either way, he's the real McCoy, no fancy words or clever photography required. If he was ever a tissue paper man, built of layers, those layers have long ago become more real than the reality they conceal. The Joker's the real serious big onion.

"Don't answer," the Joker admonishes, not that Ronald has actually tried, but that finger is wagging in his face now. "You'd just disappoint me. Let's get on with the game. Come on, giggles. How's it played?"

"You're not supposed to be here," says Ronald, returning to the stock defence of the terminally unlucky. Then, almost immediately, he says "Ow!" because the Joker has tapped him hard on the side of his head, three times, long finger beating a vicious, rapid tattoo.

"Testing, testing…jeez, is this thing on? Hello, hello HEL-lo, are you getting this on tape, Mike?" The madman's cheery voice abruptly drops half an octave. "I'm not here to debate the finer points of trespass law with you, chum, I'm here to play the game and you're the guy with the knowledge, right?"

Ronald nods, dumbly, red curls bobbing.

"Right. So don't disgrace the clown white. I mean really," says the Joker, swinging around on his heels with a moue of pique, "if you're not going to be serious about _this_, what can you be serious about?" He spreads his arms, indicating his own custom purple pinstripe, orange waistcoat, green tie. A negligent flick of fingers takes in Ronald's nylon splendour into the bargain, and then he laughs - tips back his head and the sound bubbles right up out of him like water bubbling out of the ground.

Oddly Ronald finds time in his unease for a pang of jealousy at that moment. The Joker's laughter is so goddamn infectiously jolly and utterly uninhibited. He laughs like a small child, caught in the throes of his hilarity, doubling at the waist. As we grow, we learn to control our laughter. The Joker hasn't learnt to control it one whit. Used to dealing with the laughter of children, Ronald begins to relax.

He relaxes all the way up to the moment when the Joker rises from his creased-up state, grinning like a death's head, and the muzzle of the gun looks oh-so-large in his hand.

"Hnh-hnh-hnh," sniggers the Joker, tilting back so he can look down the length of his sharp nose at Ronald. The black hole of the gun barrel fills the world. The big black zero that marks the end. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Come in Ronald's Numbers, your time is up.

"Hey," says Ronald, very softly, afraid. "Hey. Hey."

"Hay," says the Joker gently, "is for horses. Oh, _you_. You donkey."

He shoves the gun casually into Ronald's chin, bringing a smear of the white makeup onto the dark gunmetal, then whirls and clips away on his Cuban heels.

"So ante up, buttercup. Don't break my heart."

And the remaining lights go out: in the kitchen, in the backlit menus above the counter, only the glow of the emergency exit signs remaining, lurid and green and casting the figures of the two clowns into a sickly acidic glimmer in the dark.

The Joker's eyes seem to reflect, like a cat's.

"Two is two and one is one," he prompts, in a charming sing-song baritone, perching on the part of the service counter that flips up and during opening hours allows the kitchen staff in and out. The flickering smear of clown white on the gun's surface draws Ronald's eye, green-white like ultraviolet in a club. The Joker's waving the piece around like it's a kiddie flag. A soft mechanical click sounds as loud as a church bell.

Ronald's mind takes that click and uses it as a focus for his terror. Suddenly he is cripplingly frightened. An idiotic chorus of _no-safety-no-safety-nosafety _starts up, jangling across from his animal hindbrain to what remains of his cognitive forebrain that hasn't been poisoned by years of theatrical slap.

"Mommy," whines the Joker's voice, "why's the clown not funny, Mommy?"

He can't speak.

"Mommy."

He can't. The words. He can't. The smear of paint, flickering like strobe -

"Chrissakes, Mommy, and we paid twenty bucks for this crap, Mommy?"

Ronald's gut jumps up his throat and tries to throttle his vocal chords. Bile floods his mouth. Saliva bursts.

"Two is two and one is one and this is how the game's begun -" he blurts, a thin silvery thread of drool falling from his lips.

The Joker groans, not in dread, but in a horrible sort of ecstasy.

" - my name is Ronald and we'regonnahavesomefun -"

"Oh, are we," purrs the Joker, sprawling on the counter, the hand holding the gun dangling across his lap. "Are we _ever_."


End file.
